looked like the front courtyard at school. Next to that photo was a candid of Laurel and a familiar dark-haired guy on the gym bleachers, engaged in a thumb war. Emma did a double take. It was the same guy she’d seen on Sutton’s photo bulletin board the night before . . . and on the Missing poster in the police station this morning: Thayer, Madeline’s brother. Emma wondered what had happened to him. Where and why he’d run away. If, like Sutton, he hadn’t run away at all. “So how was your day?” Charlotte’s ponytail bounced against her back.
“Um, all right.” Emma darted around two girls walking in the other direction, both carrying My Fair Lady scripts. “All my teachers acted like they wanted to have my head, though.”
Charlotte sniffed. “Like that’s a surprise?”
Emma ran her fingers along the scratchy strap on Sutton’s tennis bag. Yes, she wished she could admit. It wasn’t every day a teacher called her a Devil Child, or made her sit in the very front row so she could “keep an eye on her,” or glared at her and said, “All the desks in this room are bolted down, Sutton. Just so you know.” Uh, okay.
But Charlotte had already moved on to whine about her gym teacher and something she called the Stink Vent. “And Mrs. Grady in history totally has it in for me,” she moaned. “She called me to her desk after the bell rang and went, ‘You’re a smart girl, Charlotte. Don’t hang around with that crowd I always see you with. Make something of your life!” She rolled her eyes.
They turned down the biology wing. A human skeleton stood outside one of the classrooms, which made Emma shudder. Sutton could look like that, she thought.
Then Charlotte nudged Emma’s side. “So enough about me. How are you?” She squinted at Emma’s chest. “Where’s your necklace?”
Emma felt her bare neck. “I don’t know.”
Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “That’s a surprise.” She hiked her tennis bag higher on her shoulder. “So how are things with you and Garrett?”
“Uh, he’s fine,” Emma answered slowly. She thought of the happy picture of Sutton and Garrett on Facebook. It was all she had to go by.
Charlotte shot her a lukewarm, closemouthed smile. “I heard he’s getting you something pretty special for your birthday.”
“Oh really?”
“Mm-hmm. Lucky.” Charlotte’s voice was strained. Emma sneaked a wary peek at her, but Charlotte was busy fiddling with a strap on her tennis bag.
A moment later, they entered the echoing locker room, which was abuzz with the sounds of slamming locker doors and cheerleaders warming up with a couple of Be aggressives and hand claps. Emma quickly changed into the shorts and tank top Sutton’s mom had packed, then followed Charlotte through a rabbit warren of hallways to join the rest of the tennis team. All the girls lay on the floor with their butts in the air doing piriformis stretches. Emma noticed Laurel in the second row; when Laurel saw them, she quickly looked away. A girl at the very front of the room glowered at Emma. Nisha.
“Sutton?” another voice called. A twentysomething woman marching up the side of the room smiled in Emma’s direction. She had a strawberry-blond ponytail and wore a blue polo shirt with the words HOLLIER TENNIS COACH and the name MAGGIE stitched over one boob. “Go on up! Co-captains in the front!”
Co-captain? Emma almost burst out laughing. Most of her tennis experience was from playing Wii Tennis at Alex’s house. She glanced at Charlotte helplessly, but Charlotte just shrugged.
“Chop-chop!” Coach Maggie said, making a rolling motion with her hands. Emma shifted her gaze to Nisha at the front once more. Nisha wore a heather-gray T-shirt that said HOLLIER VARSITY TENNIS CAPTAIN. Emma winced. The universe was definitely plotting against her.
She slowly wove through the maze of butt-up girls until she reached the front of the room. She gave Nisha a co-captainly, let’s-be-friends smile, but Nisha shot her back a disgusted glare.
Maggie blew her whistle, and the rest of the team sat up. “As you know, it’s tradition that on the first day of practice every year, we wear our Hollier uniforms as a show of team spirit.” A couple of girls let out whoos and whistles. “Nisha Banerjee and Sutton Mercer, our two new co-captains, will do the honors of passing out your uniforms.”
Maggie gestured to a stuffed blue plastic tub in front of Nisha. Emma peered inside and saw carefully folded tennis dresses in neat, even